"Microsoft has to compete in this arena, because it can't expect to dominate as it did in the browser wars," Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio told NewsFactor. "They already have a leg up with MSN, which is among the top five search services available."

DiDio noted that Google is losing ground, and that when Microsoft brings to bear its considerable resources in research and development and marketing, the balance of power could shift. "The Microsoft machine will kick into high gear with the launch of this search engine, and the key will be differentiating it from the competition by improving search capabilities," she said.

They've made that slightly better now, but still have room to improve there. Usually when I find an AP story, it has it grouped with other items which are also AP stories. But clearly they have more work to do there.

MSN.com still has the glitch with communicating with MSN Search. On the main MSN.com page, I clicked on "News" to do a news search. I then typed in "Owens" to get T.O. news. Instead of it doing a News search, it did a regular Web search. After you get to the search page, then you can choose News or Images or whatever. On the main MSN.com page, those labels are useless.

As for the look, I prefer the old MSN.com look. Now that it's centered on the page, it's got a Yahoo! feel without the Yahoo! simplicity.